Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching • Hacker News Board

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#41

Post by lostlogin » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 6:32 PM UTC

Ansil849 wrote: post #15

For people who are not from the region but are criticizing poaching...maybe you should make sure your own house is clean before throwing stones at others. How many people critiquing this have industrial animal farms in their country, for example? And just to be clear: I don't mean that vile acts like poaching shouldn't be criticized, I more find the hypocrisy extremely grating, especially when it comes from meat eate…

Arguing this way won’t get people to agree or to change. It’s also a bit of a stretch to link meat in one’s diet to ivory poaching.

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#42

Post by bitcurious » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 6:32 PM UTC

1cvmask wrote: post #32

This all stemmed from the CIA (and white colonizers) involvement in creating the Mozambique civil war. The civil war was then partially financed by selling ivory tusks. Hence the culling of the elephants with tusks. The tuskless went untouched and managed to reproduce in larger ratios. https://www.africanexponent.com/post/4981-civil-war-in-mozam...

There are many pre-1947 examples of Ivory in (domestic) African art, and the oldest piece in the world dates to ~38000BCe, found in present day Germany.

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#43

Post by tjpnz » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 6:33 PM UTC

Ansil849 wrote: post #15

For people who are not from the region but are criticizing poaching...maybe you should make sure your own house is clean before throwing stones at others. How many people critiquing this have industrial animal farms in their country, for example? And just to be clear: I don't mean that vile acts like poaching shouldn't be criticized, I more find the hypocrisy extremely grating, especially when it comes from meat eate…

I've been a vegetarian my whole life yet find this argument nonsensical. The animals being poached are in many cases on the verge of extinction, the animals raised on industrial farms are not. While I do find the idea of killing animals abhorrent the industrial process is significantly more humane than what happens to poached animals, which are typically left to slowly bleed to death or are permanently maimed.

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#44

Post by christkv » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 6:33 PM UTC

1cvmask wrote: post #32

This all stemmed from the CIA (and white colonizers) involvement in creating the Mozambique civil war. The civil war was then partially financed by selling ivory tusks. Hence the culling of the elephants with tusks. The tuskless went untouched and managed to reproduce in larger ratios. https://www.africanexponent.com/post/4981-civil-war-in-mozam...

I would look at who buys ivory for the reason poaching became endemic https://www.nationalgeographic.com/pages/article/150812-elep...

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#45

Post by eberkund » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 6:33 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #8

Honest question from someone who knows virtually nothing about chemistry or material science: is there a difference in quality between synthetic and natural ivory? If not, why is poaching even still a viable market?

I imagine people view it similarly to leathers made from animal hides to synthetic materials. Synthetics may be better in some ways but people are in-part attracted by the character or feel that the imperfections of a natural material provide.

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#46

Post by Ansil849 » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 6:33 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #38

Ansil849 wrote: post #15

For people who are not from the region but are criticizing poaching...maybe you should make sure your own house is clean before throwing stones at others. How many people critiquing this have industrial animal farms in their country, for example? And just to be clear: I don't mean that vile acts like poaching shouldn't be criticized, I more find the hypocrisy extremely grating, especially when it comes from meat eate…

> Sorry, but if you eat animals and yet critique poaching, then you are a hypocrite who does not give a fuck about animal welfare (because if you did, you wouldn't kill them). "The Good Place" covered this attitude a bit, with the Doug Forcett character, and showed the horrible implications of "you can always be doing more" as a guiding principle in life.

There's a world of difference between feeling that "you can always be doing more" and criticizing poaching on the internet an hour before sitting down to enjoy a steak dinner.

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#47

Post by geoffmanning » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 6:33 PM UTC

vmception wrote: post #9

geoffmanning wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure 'beautiful' or 'lucky' are words i'd use to describe it. Did you catch that the males of tuskless mothers generally don't survive, decimating the male population? It's a tragic and desperate response, though quite incredible that such a dramatic evolutionary trait can occur. It makes me wonder what we could become, if only...

Beautiful, lucky, bad Incredible, good

Not quite sure what you're getting at. The definitions of those words can't simply be categorized as good or bad. Beautiful and lucky do, however, somewhat infer a positive outcome in the context they were used. Incredible infers neither positive nor negative. It means that it's simply extraordinary that such a thing could occur, outside the bounds of previous beliefs.

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#48

Post by addicted » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 6:35 PM UTC

KiranRao0 wrote: post #22

lmilcin wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put this in context of a lot of other species who were not able to evolve a mechanism like that. The way I understand this there was likely a very small population of elephants already without tusks, maybe some kind of genetic defect that happened to be an advantage once you add greedy people into the mix. Or what else is possible is that there was one off mutation that produced small family of elephants that poacher…

I would argue what you describe is Evolution as broken into the two pieces: Genetic Drift and Natural Selection. Genetic Drift is always occurring randomly. Some elephants had a "genetic defect" to live without tusks before poaching. Some humans had the 0.1% resistance to the hypothetical super-covid before the disease. As new environmental conditions emerge (human poaching, hypothetical super-covid, etc), some genes…

> What I mean is that it is possible (and I think very likely) this isn't feat of nature suddenly evolving some new defense mechanism as response to poachers.

That's not how evolution works. Evolution doesn't ever involve a "feat of nature suddenly evolving defense mechanisms".

I don't understand this comment, unless it's a way to say the above, that evolution does not involve sudden spontaneous changes in response to an external stimuli.

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#49

Post by pessimizer » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 6:35 PM UTC

Ansil849 wrote: post #15

For people who are not from the region but are criticizing poaching...maybe you should make sure your own house is clean before throwing stones at others. How many people critiquing this have industrial animal farms in their country, for example? And just to be clear: I don't mean that vile acts like poaching shouldn't be criticized, I more find the hypocrisy extremely grating, especially when it comes from meat eate…

One can care about biodiversity and the preservation of environments without caring at all about individual animal welfare. Maybe I want to preserve species because I want to eat more varieties of meat.

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#50

Post by ceejayoz » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

Ansil849 wrote: post #46

ceejayoz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sorry, but if you eat animals and yet critique poaching, then you are a hypocrite who does not give a fuck about animal welfare (because if you did, you wouldn't kill them). "The Good Place" covered this attitude a bit, with the Doug Forcett character, and showed the horrible implications of "you can always be doing more" as a guiding principle in life.

There's a world of difference between feeling that "you can always be doing more" and criticizing poaching on the internet an hour before sitting down to enjoy a steak dinner.

You don't know who in this thread might be doing that. Some HNers are undoubtedly vegans/vegetarians. Some might be getting their beef from a local farmer raising them on pasture. Others may hold specific concerns about the extinction of an entire species that doesn't apply to cows.